-V^V '■ ^-^ 



.VnI 



n 



ENROLLMENT ACT. 



SFEECH 



HON. THOMAS WILLIAMS, 

OP 

PENNSYLVANIA, 

z 

THE E:isri^OLiL.3VEEnsrT -A.CT. 

DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OP REPKESENTATIVES, FEBRUARY 3, 1864. 



The House being in Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, aud ' bitVing 
under consideration the Enrollment Act, Mr. WILLIAMS said : 

Mr. Chairman : If this had been a new question, I should have felt greatly embarrassed 
as to the policy or propriety of commuting military service for money. This is a war 
measure, aud not a revenue measure. The Government v?ants men, and not money. 
The latter has been furnished by the people with unstinted and ungrudging liberality ; 
nay, with a prodigality which has surprise(^ ourselves, and at which the world stands 
amazed. I do not know how to value the stout heart or the strong arm of the American 
freeman in the current money of the merchant. I do not like the traffic in men and 
muscle and sinew, whether it be white or black. Looking to the experieace'of . atbfir 
republics, I should greatly deprecate the conversion of the soldier of ours into a merce- 
nary. Between men of American growth and training, and the richest of the metalsj 
I know no common standard of comparison. With me they are quantities incommen- 
surable. When the Republic demands the services of her children, I know no answer 
they can make, except that of Isaac, that they are ready for the sacrifice. It is the an- 
swer which their uncalculating instincts prompted when the echoes of the guns ib 
Charleston harbor thrilled along their nerves, and half a million of them sprang to tbeir 
arms at the first summons of the President to avenge the insult to our flag ; when the 
very yearnings of maternity were hushed, and th« Americati, like the Spartan motbef. 



2 

arrayed her youngest born as though it hnd been for the bridal, put the musket in his 
hands, and sent him out with the invocation of God's blessing upon his errand, and the 
injunction to do his duty and come back upon liis shield, if such were the fortunes of 
war, but not without it. It is the answer which they would still make, if their ardor 
were not chilled by the fatal and inglorious inaction, the .wearisome delays, the inade- 
quate results, and the want of earnestness, which have distinguished so many of our 
commanders; or, what is worse still, if their love of country was not overlaid and smoth- 
ered by the devilish suggestion of wicked counsellors, who have squatted at their ears, 
and distilled into them the subtle venom of party. 

They have ceased, however, to make that answer. Enthusiasm was too weak to sur- 
vive rebuffs and disappointments, while treason at home was but too ready to make 
them the occasion for denunciations against the Government and questions as to the 
rightfulness and the successful results of the war. It has become, of course, a neces- 
sity to remind the backward of their duty, and to insist that it shall be performed. 
These arguments have prevailed, however, with many of the people who^had been ac- 
customed to take counsel from the malcontents. They have held back, accordingly, until 
it has become indispensable to awaken them to a sense of the obligatiuns which they 
owe to their country. Their advisers do not, however, deny the duty ; so far as lip-ser- 
vice is concerned, there is an abundance of it. But they insist that the performance 
shall be a voluntary one, or, in other words, that it shall rest in their own discretion. 
Like Falstaff, they would do nothing on compulsion. To compel a Democrat to fight 
would be anti-republican, or if there is to be compulsion, it must be, upon the authority 
of a great casuist of the Romish Church, who has not read Bellarmine in vain, and 
knows how to turn a corner as adroitly as the original and inimitable Jack him- 
self, a voluntary one, a sort of compulsion in the Pickwickian sense. To compel him 
in any other way would be a violation of his prerogative as a freeman. A perfect lib- 
erty is the right of doing what we please, but never anything on compulsion 

And now a word or two in sober earnest on the objection taken seriously here, and 
urged throughout the country, in relation to the legitimacy of the draft. I need not 
apologize for speaking on that point. It is always important to satisfy the people 
not only that a thing is law, but that it is right. It is always well to add the sanctions 
of conscience and the sense of duty to the mandates of the lawgiver. Without this laws 
are practically impotent. The " sic volo, sic jubeo sieipro ratione voluntas" of an imperial 
rescript is not the argument for an American citizen. He wants more than this, and he 
wants it here because immense pains have been taken to cloud his perceptions and per- 
vert his moral sense by representing the compulsory performance of the highest of his 

duties as a violation of his liberties. The oracles of the Opposition have proclaimed 

their highest legal authorities in Pennsylvania, in the exercise of a jurisdiction hereto- 
fore unknown, have decided— that the act of the last session was unconstitutional. 
Men equally trusted by them here have insisted that its principle was anti-republican. 
It is important, therefore, to inquire whether these things are so — whether there is any- 
thing here to authorize these imputations or to excuse even a reluctant submission to a 
measure which is essential to the safety of the nation and has been made necessary by 
the counsels of the very men who now complain of it. 

I do not propose to enter into objections of detail arising out of the peculiar fea- 
ares of the law or to argue the question upon merely technical or professional grounds. 
Th«a« ar« for the courts. Tliia i« a. higher forum, and the objection made to the prin- 

'0^' ^MP96-007633 



i^-^: 



ciple — radical as it is — an appeal from the lawyer to the publicist, from the courts to 
the people. It is the statesman who must decide it, and not the judge. 

Is it true, then, that a compulsory levy of troops — a conscription, if you please — in 
the extremity of a State is anti-republican in principle, or in other words, at war with 
the spirit of our institutions and the genius and character of this (rovernmcnt? It has 
been so announced on this floor, on authority supposed to be conclusive, and has gone 
to the country without contradiction. It was a challenge of the law from a higher 
point than the Constitution. It was not the assertion in terms that the law was at va- 
riance with the Constitution, but in effect that the Constitution'itself was not republi- 
can, and did not conform to the fundamental idea on which it rested. It was the procla- 
mation of a higher law which the authority " to raise and support armies" had impinged 
upon. 

Well, I am no higher-law man, except so far as the consideration of the public safety 
or the nation's life may make me so. I am not ashamed or afraid to recognize thus 
publicly the maxim of the salus populi suprema lex. It was a provision of consummate 
wisddm in the constitution of republican Rome, and one which in the judgment of one 
of the acutest and profoundest statesman of any age was the source of all its grandeur 
as well as the guarantee of its stability, which created a dictatorship for times of greic 
public peril, for the reason that such a power must be invoked in the extremities to 
which every State is S-ibject, and that where it is wanting it becomes necessary to 
violate the constitution — which is always of bad example — in order to the salvation oi" 
th« State. 

For the sake of greater clearness, I quote the passage itself translated by me from the 
French version in default of an English one, of the " Treatise on the Republic," by 
Macliiavelli : 

" This part of the constitution of Rome deservfs to be remarked, and ranked in the number of those 
which contributed the most to the greatness of its empire. Without an institution of this nature, a Stats 
cannot escape but with groat difficulty from extraordinary convulsions." 

******** 
"It follows frnm this that all republics must have in their constitutions alike establishment. TThen it 
is wanting it becomes necessary, by pursuing the ordinary track, to see the constitution perish, or rather to 
depart from it for. the purpose of saving it. But in a State well constituted no event must happen for which 
thpri' shall be occasion to resort to extraordin.iry ways; for it extraordinary means do good for the mo- 
ment, their example constitutes a real evil. The habit of violating the constitution to do good aftarwardi 
authorizes its violation to color evil. A Republic, therefore, is never perfect if its laws have not provided 
'or everything, held the remedy always in readiness, and furnished the means of employing it. And I 
conclude by saying that republics which in imminent dangers have no recourse either to a dictator or to like 
niagistnites, must inevitably perish therein." 

The war power of our Constitution is the equivalent of the Roman dictatorship. It 
is, however, here as well as there, the extreme medicine of the Constitution, and not its 
daily bread. The mission of a republic is peace ; war is a state of violence. To con- 
duct an army upon the principles of republican equality would be fatal to all subordi- 
nation and discipline. For such an exigency as this, the normal condition of a republic 
will not serve. Its very organization would forbid it. War is anti-republican in its ef- 
fects, and can only be successfully waged on anti-republican principles. While it prevails 
the law itself must almost necessarily be silent. Its code of laws is necessarily anti- 
republican. With such a Government, therefore, it is an unnatural condition, and the 
tnirst for territorial aggrandizement through the agency of the sword does violence to 
its nature and its life. But while wars of conquest are anti-republican, a war of self- 



defense to preserve the nation's life is a legitimate because it is a necessary one. The 
doctrine of non-resistance would be fatal to any Government. When there is no mode 
left of supporting the Constitution, except by suspending the enjoyment of an indi- 
vidual right, that right must yield to the occasion. It is not the Constitution that 
authorizes the suspension of the habeas corpus. Recognizing, as its framers did, the 
necessity of putting the highest privilege of the citizen in abeyance, they do not ffrant 
but only qualify or abridge its exercises, by providing that it shall not be suspended 
except in the cases indicated. Every attribute of sovereignty which pertains to any 
Government that is supreme may be exercised when necessary, unless it is expressly 
forbidden. Thus the right of eminent domain^ as it is called by the publicists, or that 
which authorizes the seizure or destruction of private property for public uses, and the 
kindred power of taxation which seizes it without other equivalent than the protection 
which the GovLTiinicnt affords, are not the subjects of special grant., but only of special 
limitation. Establish a government that is independent and sovereign, and they belong 
to it ol' course, because they are essential attributes, inseparable from its very being. If 
a Government can, however, take private property, which is the mere product of labor, 
without compensation, for a public use, it is but a step further, and an easy one, to take 
the producer himself, as it does when it compels him to work on the highway on the 
ground of public necessity. 

Ii is not disputed, as I understand, by anybody here, that the Government is entitled 
to the military services of all its citizens when they are needed for its defense. The 
objeijtion is only that a compulsory levy is anti-republican. If this be true, then the idea 
of such a thing as a republican Government is the wildest of chimeras. Admitting the 
duty, the right to enforce it is a corollary, a necessary consequence, in this case as in all 
others. The notion of any Government at all presupposes supremacy,subordination, and 
eonsttaint. No Government ever did or ever can rest upon the mere voluntary princi- 
]ile. All the duties of the citizen, except those merely moral ones that are said to be of 
imperfect obligation — all that are political ^l least — rest upon the idea of coercion. 
That is the principle of every law. That is the import of the whole judicial machinery 
with which we are surrounded. Hht posse comitatus itself is nothing more nor less than 
a compulsory levy, an arniiy improvised to execute the laws. When the time arrives — 
which will not be until the millennium foreshadowed by the prophets, and several years 
nher the modern Democracy shall have died out like the extinct monsters of the earlier 
ceological epochs — when men shall perform their duties voluntarily, there will be no 
further occasion for either Government or laws. The notion that the mob of New York, 
and the unnatural sympathizers with the rebellion everywhere, shall not be compelled to 
(lefend the Government that protects them in all their rights and endows them with the 
unwonted privilege of governing other people, is but the extension of the argument of 
the late Attorney General of the United States, and now reporter of its Supreme Court, 
that there could be no coercion of States, and that this great Government was without 
even the power of self-defense, was helpless against the parricide, and must uncover its 
bosom or wrap its robes around it and submit to death without a struggle whenever the 
murderous blow was aimed by the hands of its own children. That was according to 
programme. Both have the same purpose and meaning. That would have crowned 
the work of the traitors with immediate success. This is a slower poison, which would 
leave the defense ')(" the nation to the loyal Unionists in the field, and transfer the di- 
rection of the GovernraciU to tiie hnnds of the auxiliaries of the rtbcllion, who choose 



,^A^V^ 



"to kiss my lady peace at home ; " who know that they can serve the cause they love, 
with more effect and greater safety here by affecting loyalty, misrepresenting' the designs 
of the Government, discouraging volunteering, and denouncing compulsory levies of 
men, than by taking their places openly in the armies of the confederacy. I do not know 
<a man of them who is not now an " unconditional Unionist "provided he can have " the 
Union as it was," which he knows to be impossible, whether we succeed or fail, or trea^ 
as he desires us to do, and hopes to bring about by cherishing the disease, preserving 
the cause of the disunion, and declining to employ the most necessary and effective 
weapon which Providence has placed in our hands for compelling the eventual restora- 
tion of the Union itself. Thank God 1 the instincts of the people, the loyal army at 
home, have revolted at the special plea of the attorney, and even converted him at the 
late elections into the noisiest of patriots and the professed advocate Of the vigorous 
prosecution of the war ; that is to say on peace principles, and provided you will refuse 
to allow the willing negro or compel the reluctr.nt and recalcitrant Democrat to fight. 
Tb« fear is, in view of the well-ktown Army sentiment, that it would change the very 
nature of the latter by showing him the realities of war and miaking him a radical, or, 
in other words, an earnest man. ^ 

We have the authority of one of the apostles of the new Democracy now holding a 
seat on this floor, if the newspapers have not misrepresented him, for the opinion pub- 
licly expressed in the great peace convention at New York, that a war Democrat is an 
impossible thing; and that any man who would draw a sword here in such a quarrel — 
I mean on this side of it — is no better than a Black Republican. And so it is that, while 
all the Democracy of Butler and Burnside and Hooker and other fighting generals of 
that stamp, who have proved that they were in earnest, has failed to shelter them from 
the denunciations of the rebel papers in Richmond and New York, the non-combatant 
qualities of the grave-digger of the Chickahominy and the loiterer at Bull Run have 
made him the idol of the Democracy in both those capitals. If the gentleman from 
Kentucky, who was taxed a few days ago by his colleagues^, with infidelity to his pledges 
to vote for a war Democrat, had adverted to the sentiment to which 1 have just referred, 
he might have answered that a war Democrat was a myth — a person even more apocry- 
phal than Prester John or the man with the iron mask. 

If it be true, however, that a compulsory levy of men for the protection of the Gov- 
ernment or the enforcement of its laws is anti-republican, then I say again that republi- 
can government is just as impossible a thing as a war Democrat. The nation which 
cannot command the military services of its people has no guarantee of life, and must 
inevitably perish in its first formidable' convulsion. To presume that they will all rush 
to its standard at the first summons, and that they will adhere to it alike through good 
and ill fortune, alike through sunshine and through storm, is to suppose in the face of 
our present experience that it contains no bold traitors who will lift their hands against 
it in battle, no cowardly miscreants who, with professions of loyalty on their lips, will 
adopt the safe policy of skulking from its defense, or aiding and encouraging those who 
are endeavoring to overthrow it. The time was when this service wag a privilege of 
rank or fortune; when the soldier served without wages, although he derives his name 
from the idea of pay, and when the craven who refused to respond to the summon.^ of 
his country was visited with the dire anathema which is so well paraphrased bv the ge- 
nius of the immortal Scott, and finds its climacteric in the imprecation " Woe to the 



6? 

traitor, woe ! " A, greater than he has retaarked that " the age of chivalry is gone, and 
the age of sophisters and economists has succeeded." It was not so at the commence- 
ment of this rebellion. 

I happened to be at the seat of government of Pennsylvania when the news of the 
bombardment of Sumter came over the electric wires, and shook its capital as with an 
earthquake throe, and then sped on its fiery errand along the Susquehanna and the Del- 
ware and the limpid, Alleghany, until it reached the distant shore of the ,great lake 
which bathes her northwestern confines. The fiery cross that passed frorn hand to hand 
and gathered the clansmen of the hill around the banner of their chief never so ti;aveled, 
never lighted such a conflagration as was kindlpd by that message. Before the setting 
of another sun a hundred thousand Pennsylvania men were begging for the privilege of 
laying down their lives in the defense of the insulted flag of their fathers. The political 
managers of the Democratic party who had bargained against coercion and pledged 
themselves that Pennsylvania would take sides with t.he rebellious State? were appalled 
by the demonstration, and slunk away from the public gaze which would have blasted 
them. It was only when reverses overtook our arms — reverses which were the conse- 
quence of the unsuccessful effort to propitiate themselves by taking counsel with and 
employing men of the same type of thought — that they ventured to reappear,and man- 
aged to seduce the loyal men of the Democratic party into the belief that a Republican 
Administration was unfit to conduct the war, which they, reinforced by the argument 
that it was obliged to borrow its generals almost exclusively from the Democratic party. 
If a draft was made necessary after such a demonstration it was through their agency. 
If it has proved ineSective or unpopular it is because they have endeavored to make 
it so. • 

The country knows how the question was dealt with by the Democratic authorities of 
New York. It knows, too, the process by which the Democratic judges of the supreme 
court of Pennsylvania undertook, with indecent precipitancy, and in the exercise of a 
jurisdiction entirely new, to restrain the execution of the law which authorized it. And 
we are reminded here from day to day that there are men among us who apparently do 
not intend that the country shall find soldiers, either white or black, if they can prevent 
it ; who insist that we shall not enlist the negro because it is a privilege which belongs 
only to the white man^ who say to the white man that he ought not to volunteer because 
it is an abolition war; and that the conscription is unlawful and unnecessary because we 
ought to depend on volunteers ; and who, after doing everything in their power to ren- 
der the law ineffective, come here and, with a coolness that would be absolutely refreshing 
if the times were not so much out of joint, demand its repeal on the ground that 
they have succeeded ! I have heard it stated that the district of the gentleman from 
New York who is most importunate on this point has yielded^ — under his patriotic aus- 
pices, no doubt — about three hundred and fifty soldiers, leaving his voters, of course, 
most comfortably intact, and in a condition to govern the nation at least, if they will 
not fight for it. If he favors the war, however, as he says he does, why does he not 
endeavor to amend the law? If the commutation clause is the difficulty with his con- 
stituents, and he thinks that a poor man can pay $1,000 for a substitute more easily 
than he can pay $300, why does he not move to strike it out? 

I fear it cannot be made to suit gentlemen of that Ciist of mind and heart unless it 
can be so framed as to defeat the object entirely. Their constitutional scruples will not 
allow them to do anything for the salvation of this nation. They have found no diffi- 



calty heretofore in discovering in that instrument every power that was required to 
farther the interests of the divine institution. They had no difficulty in regard to the 
Louisiana or Florida purchases ; none as to the annexation of Texas ; none as to the 
assumption of its debts ; none as to the purchase or seizure, at the expense of another 
war like the Mexican if necessary, of the gem of the Antilles. When the attempt is 
made, however, to extract anything valuable from that instrument for the interests of 
humanity or the preservation of the nation's life, it is no better than a caput mortuum — 
without vitality, full of obstructions, impotent for good, but alive all over, in all ita 
members, and actively omnipotent, too, for mischief. These constitutionaliexpounders 
who strain at a gnat make no'account of taking in a camel at a breakfast. I should 
despair of making anything out of them by a constitutional argument. 



W. H. Moore, Printer 



D '05 



■MM^. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiijiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiii {ii" !■!!■■! 





015 910 395 n % 



